Mass demonstrations in Brazil continue in lead up to 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games

As Brazil continues
to be rocked by the largest street demonstrations the country has witnessed in
20 years, some of the harsh social realities many Brazilians deal with have
begun to make their way into the mainstream media. The New York Times recently
ran a piece and even the Economist – the great champion of free market
economics – claimed Brazilians unfairly pay first-world taxes for third-world
services. Mike Davis – author of Planet of Slums – has
also provided an interesting article on the government’s fight against crime and
the setbacks it has witnessed since the days Lula da Silva was in office. Davis
writes:

To help convince the International Olympic Committee that Rio would be a
safe as well as beautiful site for the 2016 games, first the government
had to capture and hold the morros. The trial run in 2008 targeted Dona
Marta, a famous cliff-dwelling favela in the south zone, which boasts
some of the best samba and funk in Rio. A year later the police
pacification unit (UPP) entered Cidade de Deus in the west zone. In each
case there was less opposition from gangs than expected and the
government invoked early ‘successes’.

Then, just two weeks after huge crowds celebrated the award of
the games to Rio, gang members firing a 50-caliber machine-gun brought
down a police helicopter over the favela of Morro dos Macacos. Amateur
video relayed across the world showed the helicopter’s fiery crash into a
local soccer field, killing three policemen and badly burning two
others.

Davis goes on to add:

Jose Mariano Beltrame, police chief and secretary of security for the
state of Rio, called it ‘our 9/11’, while the US consul, in emails
released by Wikileaks, worried that gang violence had escalated into ‘a
full-bore internal armed conflict’ and that Washington had
underestimated the extent to which the ‘favelas have been outside state
authority’. State governor Sergio Cabral again asked Lula for help from
the army, and the army, in turn, volunteered to apply the ‘clear and
hold’ tactics it had learned in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where it has been
leading the UN stabilisation mission since 2004.

After many months of skirmishes and the establishment of more
UPP beachheads, the full might of the Brazilian state was again
unleashed against the Red Command in Complexo do Alemao. On ‘D Day,’ 25
November 2010, Marines and BOPE stormed the satellite favela of Vila
Cruzeiro, killing 31 people, but the narco-revolutionaries simply
retreated deeper into their labyrinth. Army paratroopers were brought in
and the authorities broadcast a ‘surrender or die’ ultimatum. The Red
Command defiantly replied with bus burnings and assaults across the
city. Two days later, 3,000 troops with tanks and helicopter gunships
overwhelmed the district. They seized truckloads of drugs and guns, but
most gang members slipped away again.

Lula, in his last month in office, tried to put a brave face on
military frustration: ‘The important thing is we have taken the first
step. We went in, we are inside Complexo do Alemao.’ He described the
assault as just the beginning of the campaign to take back the favelas
(in fact it was already four years old) and promised ‘we will win this
war’.